On the third step, he understood, with a clarity that stopped the breath in his chest, that he would do it all over again. The killing. Any of it. All of it. For her.
God help me. God help us both.
I swore over me sister’s broken body that I’d never let a woman near me. That I’d never want a woman so badly that losin’ herwould break me. For years I’ve kept that oath. Years, and nay one has come close. Until Olivia.
I’ve just slit a man from throat to belly in me own hall and felt nothin’ doin’ it. I’d do it again this minute. It wasnae for me clan, and it wasnae for me honor, and it wasnae for the peace.
It was for her. And she doesnae even ken it.
CHAPTER 15
He laidher down on the great bed as if she might shatter in his hands, and she let him, which she would think on later and be ashamed of.
The room was warm. A fire had been built up high in the hearth, and the bed was vast and dark and smelled of him, of leather and cold air and the particular clean warmth of his skin. She lay in the middle of it in her ruined wedding gown and watched her husband of three hours move around the room, taking care of her.
He brought water. He found a cloth, wet it, crouched at the side of the bed, and pressed it with a gentleness that did not suit his great scarred hands to the bruise blooming purple on her arm where Dougal Ross had gripped her.
He drew the torn shoulder of her gown closed and pinned it with his silver brooch so that she was decent. He did all of it without one word, his dark head bent, his jaw clenched tight.
“Why…” Olivia said into the quiet. “Why are ye bein’ kind to me?”
He looked up. The firelight caught the scar, and the dark eyes, and the grim, tired, beautiful ruin of his face.
“Ye’re me wife, lassie,” he said, as if that were the answer to every question that had ever been asked since the creation of the world.
And some wall in Olivia, held up with both bare hands since the day a letter dropped from her fingers in a hall at Blythe, simply gave way beneath her.
And then it came unbidden.
The yard at Blythe. The gray morning. The wet, dreadful ease of it. A blade going into a man the way a knife went into fruit, and her father folding down into the mud, and this man standing over him with the same face and nothing on it. Nothing at all. She had built six months of hatred on that nothing.
She had seen it again tonight. The very same nothing.
He opened a man’s belly in his own hall, and his face didnae change. He passed the dirk to Alastair and asked for the fiddles. That is what he is. That is the thing I swore I’d never forget, and I have been sittin’ in a warm room lettin’ him wash the blood off me arm as if he were a different creature entirely.
Olivia made herself look at him. At the tired ruin of him crouched at her feet with a bloodied cloth in his hand.
He isnae a different creature. He’s the same one. He killed me faither with that face.
And the thing that ought to frighten me, the thing that ought to send me screamin’ from this room, is that I ken exactly why he did it that night. He did it because a man put his hands on me.
God forgive me. God forgive me, I am nae frightened at all.
That was the whole horror of it, and the whole truth. The monster had come out of him again, in her defense, with her name on it. And instead of running from the room, she had let him carry her up the stairs, and let him kneel, and let him tend her, and something in her that she did not recognize and had no name for had gone quiet and warm and unafraid.
She was not appalled by him. She was appalled byherself.
The wall came down.
She reached up and cupped his hard jaw in both her hands and kissed him.
For a moment, for one burning moment, he let her. His mouth opened under hers, and a sound broke out of him, low and helpless and wanting. His hand came up to fist in her loosenedhair, and she felt the whole leashed strength of him strain toward her like a hound come to the end of its chain.
And then he tore himself back.
He was breathing hard. So was she. He had taken just a step back from the bed and stood there with his fists clenched at his sides, terrible longing written plainly all over his face.
He shook his head once.
